Tuesday, February 26, 2013

I posted a picture of the cover of Finn's baby book on Instagram and many of you wanted to peek inside. Here it is! It was definitely a labor of love, consuming naptime and evening hours for weeks. I made all of the pages in Photoshop Elements and uploaded them to the MyPublisher app as full picture spreads. The most time consuming part about it was having photos and photoshop and the book app all open on my ancient computer, but it all came together pretty quickly once I planned out how to tackle it.

I made the book on My Publisher, and went with their largest option, the 11.5"x15" deluxe hardcover with a linen cover in taupe.

It's kind of huge. Here's my phone for scale:

I paid a bit extra for the lay-flat pages:

I went with the super gloss printing which I've never gotten before and I really like it. I think it makes the pages a bit more durable and just seem nicer overall (but harder to photograph!).

I decided to do the book in chronological order for the most part, so started it off with a collage of my weekly belly pictures. (Click on any of these to enlarge.)

Next up is a spread of his ultrasound pictures. That bottom right one creeps me out because it really does look just like Finn.

Pretty nursery pics. I'm quite sure it was never this organized ever again so I'm glad it was documented!

The world's briefest version of Finn's birth story (no room for my 8 part saga here).

I included his hospital birth certificate, footprints, and some more of his very first pictures next. Then this spread of hospital visitors and early visitors to our home.

After these intro pages, I continued chronologically with two spreads for each month. On the first page of each, I put the four or five weekly photos from that month. Then I did a collage of my favorite photos from that month. I organize all of our pictures in folders by month so this was pretty painless (although SUCH a time suck to go through all of his teeny baby pictures and ooh and ahh).

Here's May:

Next I pasted in the letter that I had written to Finn on my blog along with four pictures from his monthly photo shoot and his weight/height stats for the month.

I did extra spreads for any exciting events that happened throughout the year and put them in chronologically with the monthly pages. Here are a few...

July- First Trip to Maine:

August- A day in Finn's life:

October- First Halloween:

December- Christmas and cruise:

January- another day in the life:

March- First Birthday!

At the end of the book I did a few pages that were ideas taken from my own baby book.

A growth chart with some photos from our pediatrician visits:

A tooth chart and summary of "firsts":

A list of what was going on in the world when Finn was born and a collage of his weekly pictures to round out the book:

The end! It was 87 pages in all, and with a MyPublisher sale (click HERE for a 50% off code), the book came to about $120. Obviously way more than I would normally spend on a photo album but well worth it to me. For full disclosure, MyPublisher actually screwed up some of the margins on the first book that I ordered. In the preview mode of their app, the pages were fine, but in the online mode (which I didn't use), they were cut off, as they were when the book arrived. Their customer service was great and sent me a credit so that I could fix the margins and remake the book. They let me keep the first version which is a great bonus because now I have a copy for Finn to look at (and most likely beat up) and a copy to set aside and keep nice. I'm super happy with the quality and will order from them again.